Bad News

As a young man he fought with a Ugandan rebellion, becoming that country’s head of military intelligence and receiving training in America. In 1990, he commanded a force of Rwandans who had broken off from the Ugandan army and invaded Rwanda. The invasion set off a protracted conflict that the president called a war of “liberation” and culminated in Rwanda’s 1994 genocide. The end of the genocide, in July 1994, was like a new birth for the president, as he took power in Rwanda.

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Some were permitted to ask questions at his events. “Your Excellency, why are so many countries eager to study our roads, hospitals and poverty-reduction programs? Is it because the country is developing so rapidly after the genocide?” “Our country has learned a lot from its history,” the president said. He added that he was happy to share what had worked for Rwanda, and what had not, with anyone who was willing to learn.

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The radio crackled, radiated these ideas of the authorities’ success. “Your Excellency, I was asking myself the other day why our government is so capable and professional, why we have so little corruption. Our business ratings are so good. The World Bank, the United Nations, the Americans and the British are praising us. But what is the cause for the praise? Yesterday I realized the answer. It is our leadership, Your Excellency. This is our secret.”

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“I think his concept of the dialectic can help describe my life. Two ideas are opposed, and they give rise to a greater truth. Sometimes I feel this is why I confront the authorities.” He added: “I think it is also because I realized many years ago that God was dead.”

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His answer surprised me. “I died during the genocide,” he said. “My entire family was massacred. I should have been killed with them. Now what’s there to fear; are they going to kill me a second time?” He called himself one of the walking dead. It seemed many survivors of the genocide described themselves as such.

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was referring to crimes committed during the genocide and afterward in Congo. The president’s forces had killed tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of people. His army had invaded Congo, sparking a war there that still runs today and has killed many millions more, mostly from hunger and disease. The president had said he was hunting down the perpetrators of the genocide in Congo, but his forces reached nearly a thousand miles into that country and installed a new government there while slaughtering unarmed women and children en route. The massacres in Congo had been documented in U.N. reports—which had called them acts of a possible counter-genocide—but the killings in Rwanda were still shrouded in mystery. The president had suppressed investigations. When I asked Rwandans about these deaths they said, “I know nothing about them.”

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“He’s killed a lot of people,” Moses said, “who will never receive justice. Many Rwandan families cannot name their dead because he was responsible.” Moses waited a moment. “But did you know he also killed his fighters, including his child soldiers? It was a policy in his rebel forces. There was a word for it, kufaniya. It means ‘do something for him.’ That kind of ruthlessness, we started to realize it later. He cares for nobody. Even his wife means nothing to him. I think he is a little sick in the mind.” I asked why a man would kill his own people. “He only knows to rule by fear.” Moses had become perturbed. “He grew up as a refugee. He returned from exile with his army and conquered this country. A Pygmy senator, after that war, said that when the big man and his people left Rwanda they had to leave their stomachs at the border, and go with their nobility, so people abroad would care for and feed them. But when they returned, they found these stomachs at the border, hungry for thirty years. They left behind their nobility, and picked up the stomachs.”

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waited. Moses became bolder and now mentioned the president. “Nobility is very important for our people. Politeness, generosity. The president kills people who fought by his side, who protected his life, and were like his brothers. Where is the nobility in that?”

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This was strange, for the culture of Rwanda would value preserving the dead body as a whole. Even if only a femur and a fragment of bone had been found after the genocide, they should be buried together, to represent the body, honor the dead. But the victims had here been dismantled, and their bones regrouped by part; it had the effect of emphasizing the number.

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And one realized that the memorials also served the purpose of transmission. And that the transmission was meant to cause distress. It was as in Rwandan schools, where teachers complained that during the memorial season the videos on national television made the children uncontrollable. But despite the teachers’ complaints, the gruesome films continued. I was doubly horrified: I had expected something else from the memorials: some compassion for society, but I felt only violence. The government of Rwanda had created these events, which instead of healing society, increased its trauma. The terror of the genocide was being used and spread. One realized that the genocide and the time of war, almost two decades past, were still kept alive in the country. The trauma of the genocide was, in the children, running like roots through society.

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“They are manufacturing fear in these places,” Moses said, gasping. “We survivors have asked them to stop this violence. What do they want from us?” I could see he had begun to shake, that he had lost strength in his legs. “Sometimes I cry to myself at night. Like this”—he put his teeth over his lips and started to bawl—“not because of the memories of the genocide. But because of how the government mocks the genocide, uses it to get pity from the world, to get money, and at the same time keep us in a state of fear.”

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“The imbeciles, the imbeciles,” Moses repeated. He seemed not to care about the government officers standing nearby. “The imbeciles who run this country are negating us, using us, selling us. They are building our country on our bodies, our blood. They hold shows like this, theaters, and pretend. This place is the trauma. They put people in prison for negating the genocide. But if they were serious about it then the first man in prison would be the one who ordered this.”

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Moses said there were other places: military-style camps across the country for children. Kept far from society, the children spent weeks in them, were dressed in military fatigues, and indoctrinated to be utterly devoted to the government.

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The president each year held an event, at which he brought thousands together in the national stadium: films of the killings were played, the crowd was driven into a traumatized frenzy. And the president reminded everyone that he was their savior. There were other places as well. “We can’t say anything,” he said. “And when the president is done, no one will want to.” On the journey home it took Moses several hours to regain some sense of calm. “I don’t know if we will succeed against this,” he said. “But God knows we have to try.”

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She was an opposition politician who had been living in the Netherlands, and had returned to run in the upcoming election against the president. One of her first acts in Rwanda was to visit a genocide memorial and say that there were many others who had been killed but were not remembered—she was also referring to those massacred by the president’s forces, all mention of whom was suppressed.

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The main story in this first issue was about malnutrition. The government position was that Rwanda had sufficient food and that the president’s policies had banished hunger. Gibson had avoided confronting the official line. Without ever stating that Rwanda had a malnutrition problem, and that children even in the capital—the beacon of the government’s message of its success to the world—were dying from the condition, Gibson simply provided information to mothers that would help them feed their children.

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Even posing the question could be seen as a form of displeasure, dissent. It was why one always added that the government was doing everything necessary.

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What then was the truth about how people were faring? The president was declaring to the world that he was creating progress: he was growing the country’s economy, reducing poverty, reducing hunger. But he suppressed verification of these claims.

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the World Food Programme announced a famine outbreak in Rwanda in 2006, affecting hundreds of thousands of people, the government denied it. To this day, there was officially no famine. When the United Nations released a study in 2007, signed off on by Rwanda’s finance minister, saying the number of impoverished people in the country had risen, and that hunger would remain above levels in 1990—the year the president had invaded Rwanda to “liberate” the people from the previous regime—the government forced the United Nations to discredit its findings and blacklist the researchers. A World Bank research team studying the country’s progress, directly testing the president’s claim that he had improved life in Rwanda since 1990, was forced to destroy the data it had collected when it became clear that the study was willing to contradict the official narrative.

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Researchers investigating police corruption were expelled from the country; the country was declared among the least corrupt. A magical nation was thus created.

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The government’s telling of history was rich in such deceptions. An irony of the memorials was their slogan, “Never Forget,” which to many Rwandans, even genocide survivors, meant the opposite. Rwandans had to forget, for example, that the president had opposed the deployment of U.N. peacekeepers one month into the hundred-day genocide.

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The president had worried that the peacekeepers would interfere with his military campaign, and prevent him from taking power. Thousands of deaths in the genocide could have been avoided, besides the scores of civilians his forces had killed. But the president had cast himself as the hero of the genocide, as the man who had ended it while the world stood idle.

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He was pitting himself against a system that was incredibly powerful. It was the same system that could eradicate its explosions. The state was highly ordered and controlled. Every piece of the country was organized into administrative units benignly called “villages.” Each village, or umudugudu, contained about one hundred families. Even the capital was but an agglomeration of such villages. The president called his office Urugwiro village. Each village had its head, its security officer and its “journalist” or informer, all of whom had to approve of one’s behavior if one wanted something from the government—a passport, for example. The system’s power was shown in seemingly innocuous happenings: slippers were worn overnight by masses of villagers following a government order. Plastic bags were suddenly eradicated from the corners of the country. To achieve such control the government had relocated thousands of people in the countryside to new “villages.” Directives from the government now could be followed down to the individual. And there was no privacy.

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Officials and security agents in the villages kept track of visitors and those traveling. Permission was required if someone was to stay overnight. Hotels every day sent records to the security services, with the names of visitors, using Rwanda’s network of well-paved roads. Where was Gibson going to hide?

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In a dictatorship one gained one’s freedom not by defending the liberty of others but by working to diminish it; for each person you turned in you earned more space. Even if such freedom could not last, even if you could lose by betrayal what had been gained by betrayal, it was a kind of freedom: a negative freedom. People’s innate desire to be free thus provided essential sustenance to repression, dictatorship.

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Such speed and efficiency were hardly known on this continent—or even in the world. But when the killing began there were almost no voices to oppose it. Those who did were imprisoned or killed. The single-minded dedication of a nation unable to think or say otherwise produced one of the greatest and most horrific crimes in a century.

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The hatred between ruler and ruled in Rwanda was old. But the pensée unique took this hatred to its logical limit. Just prior to the genocide newspapers were launched principally to flatter the government, and they would spur the killers on, and go to great lengths to debase the victims. Flattery was a symptom of the pensée unique. It is what replaced the voices that were dead.

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Forbidden from speaking their minds, from asking questions, loyalty and fear took over. Ideas of good and evil, and people’s convictions about them, became crystallized, and devastating. The genocide went far: mothers killed their children; men murdered their wives; neighbors killed each other; children hacked into their parents.

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And at a press conference the president at last acknowledged the fears. “Nobody can carry out a coup d’état. Never! Please!” But he was visibly agitated; he was furious that his generals would disobey and turn against him. He guaranteed the country’s security. His army was one of the most powerful and merciless in Africa. “Sleep well,” he told his people.

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“Have you noticed?” he said, suddenly. “Noticed what?” He pointed in front of us. “The lights. Have you seen anything like them?” He paused. I was not quite sure what he meant, but I looked carefully at the orange sodium-vapor points, followed them both ways along the road. “You grew up in Dubai, yes?” I nodded at him. “Have you noticed the space between the street lights? Tell me, are they this close in Dubai?” I had not remarked this before. “No. Certainly not,” I said after some thought. I asked him how he knew about the lighting in Dubai. He had seen it on photographs and, adjusting for scale, had compared the distance. He went on: “You would think from the street lights that Rwanda is a resource-rich country. But only four percent of Rwanda’s people have electricity in their houses. Four percent! How incredible. But this is the first thing visitors see. And this is impressive, they are stunned by the small country in Africa that has come through a genocide, and now has such roads, such lights.” I asked him what he thought of the lights. “Wait a little,” Gibson said. “Look at the bottom of the hill. Below the line of streetlamps. Do you see that it is all black in the valley? What is there?” I absorbed the effect of his tone, clear, direct—appealing. Gibson wanted to communicate something important, something dear to him. I stayed attentive to his every word. “Ordinary people live there. They live in that blackness. And now again look at the street.” The sudden light, its brightness, mildly hurt the eye. “You see the cars driving up and down. Do you see people?”

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“Why do they walk in the dark? You would think we would use these wonderful new roads we have been given—isn’t this development, progress? But no. Ah, look at this road! Anyone can see this for himself! And you begin to understand our country. We the poor, we are like the insects, scared of the lights. We hide from the government, which wants to see us all the time. So you now see that the truth in our country is hidden, and you need to look not for what is there, but for what they hide. You cannot pay attention to what they show you, but need to listen to those who are kept quiet. You need to look differently in a dictatorship, you need to think about how to listen to people who live in fear.”

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Power was inverted. At the highest government positions the president would sometimes make a show of accommodating rivals, so the world would see him as sharing power. But the repression was moved to the level of the villages, where only those devoted to the president were installed as administrators. In this way the individual had little hope of liberty.

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And now many of those with any conviction—the most important of qualities for the reporter, particularly in such a dangerous environment—were lost to the easy satisfaction that anger offered.

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Roger said he had already eaten. I wondered if it was true, or if he was being infura. This was the local notion of dignity. Gluttony was a particularly egregious sin—it was said that an infura could starve to death on a neighbor’s porch but not admit that he was hungry. Roger was eyeing the menu. I told him a slice of pizza and a soft drink would not be too much.

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“You know,” he said, “people are only free when they are not.” Again he chuckled. “You see what I mean?” He laughed, and pointed at his head. “The control is here,” he said, raising his eyebrows. “Once you are controlled here, then they let you walk around like you are free.”

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He left a piece of his pizza uneaten on the plate. The same with his soft drink, a part of it left in the bottle. “You know, all that has been built—the roads, the new skyscraper, the eight percent growth in the economy—it’s been built by the military, and it’s all great,” he said. “What we need today is democracy. But every time I write something the president’s office summons me. Now it’s that enemy general. Am I working for him, they ask, just because I question their policies.”

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He shrugged. “In this place, secrets are everything. Secrets are how you build relationships. They are power. What is his name? Even that is a threat. There are laws against ‘laughing at others’ misfortune’ and ‘provoking ill feelings.’ How to enforce such laws without looking into, even possessing, someone’s soul? You know a few years ago we were very close to war with Uganda. I was very happy, because I knew I would pass my night in their capital.”

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It was then that I had a flash of understanding about Roger. I had a sudden sense about him—the strange laugh, the perception, the flood of words—of isolation. I felt he had experienced a profound seclusion, living in such thoughts alone. It could happen in a dictatorship. And it was why he seemed such a misfit, so odd. I

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Agnès was arrested after she wrote an article titled “It Is Not the King Who Kills, but His Courtiers.” This was a well-known proverb from the time of the Rwandan monarchy.

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It was routine government method to smear those it considered enemies. In this way a ministry official who had noted some problems with government policies was accused of raping his employee. A man who had saved people during the genocide was accused of having run a racket to extort money from them. A political rival of the president was accused of aiding terrorists. Someone who had become too successful could be accused, out of pure jealousy, of harboring corrupt ideas. The government used rumor to advance its purpose. Without justice, without any means to defend oneself, if the government wanted you it was easy to create a crime; and the accused were often too afraid even to point out that the proof had been fabricated.

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On a walk with Moses in his neighborhood one day, we stopped at an acquaintance’s home as a courtesy. There, I witnessed a ceremony in which the family gathered around a photograph of the president hung on the wall, and prayed to him, wishing that he should be secure. Moses and I also clasped our hands. The president, his lips gently parted in the photograph, was seen as their sole protector.

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They in fact seek to be paraded, to meet the visitor, whom they asked to spread word of their accomplishment. It was the government’s way of breaking society. These were its heroes: they set the example that even the bond between mother and child should not come before one’s loyalty to the state.

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There was only one father in this society. And it seemed impossible in such a country for one to trust a friend, or a colleague, even a teacher. This was the ultimate goal of the Intore: total loyalty.

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His case seemed serious, and already mature: there was nothing I could do if the Ministry of Defence was pursuing him. This army was legendary for its ruthlessness and efficiency. They would without hesitation kill anyone who got in the way of their work.

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Roger spoke. “Listen, not long ago in my country we had a genocide. People were killing one another with machetes and knives. Not hundreds of people, not thousands of people. Almost one million people. The world was watching us on TV. United Nations soldiers were here. All the foreigners were here. They watched us.” He paused. “They did nothing.” The

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“The genocide becomes a theater, like a circus, under this regime,” one of them said.

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History, particularly of the time of the genocide, was so vital to the president’s repression that for many years it was not taught by schoolteachers but by soldiers. This history had now been implanted in the national school curriculum. The president, a survivor said, had known where people had been gathered to be massacred during the genocide. They had been in camps, churches, schoolyards. But after opposing the deployment of U.N. peacekeepers, the president had directed his troops away from these people and toward his military targets, so he could focus on the conquest of power. This happened repeatedly: tens of thousands of people were killed in these preventable massacres, though some managed to escape and survive. But in the years after the genocide the president had silenced the survivors so they could not say what they had seen. He had taken over survivors’ associations by placing figures of his regime in key positions. The associations praised the president. With bright bulbs hanging over us, the survivors spoke of how the president “disdained” them. He insulted the survivors in private with phrases like “your genocide,” though he too was Tutsi. “We tell the president that we are sensitive to such words, but he and his people keep using them.” The president told survivors that they had not suffered, as he had, for years in exile. “He compares his childhood humiliation to the genocide. The regime, in the way it organizes the memorials, in the way that it speaks to us, negates what we experienced. It makes us feel ashamed that the genocide happened to us.” As with Moses, the season of remembrance had stirred in the survivors such frustration. All they could do was speak among themselves.

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But they were wielding shovels and machetes, and working on the road. I realized immediately to where I had been brought. These men were killers from the genocide, who had been commissioned for the travail d’intérêt général, or public works, as punishment for their crimes.

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They were prisoners of the state, though they lived in open-air countryside camps. And though these were some of the most dangerous men in the country—convicted of some of the most heinous crimes known to humanity—there was hardly a guard in sight. It was an indication of the level of control of the regime: where could these men run to? In a state where citizens sided with the government there was nowhere to hide. Even with minimal security the prisoners would not escape; they would obediently serve out their sentences.

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Again, it was the word of authority that had sentenced them. Simple words had attained such power.

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Many of the killers had been released from prison by the government, partly because the prisons had been overcrowded. They lived on the hills, but were loath to be identified. It was usually only possible to talk to them with some authorization from the state. And in that case one was immediately compromised—for one did not know if they were talking to you or if they were acting out the part that the state had set for them, in the “theater” that Moses had talked about.

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I was reminded of what Gibson had said to me about the lights. He had shown me that the dictatorship had made two worlds: one for visitors and another for the citizens. One in which the explosion was real, and another, in parallel, in which it was not. One in which there was memory, and another with new trauma. A world in which the streetlights seemed wonderful, signs of progress, and another in which they were frightening.

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The killer, or génocidaire, was a sort of myth. In the visitor’s world that Gibson had talked about they were the worst kind of citizen, responsible for the ill. They were the symbols of evil.

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That he had been a bourgmestre meant that he had been quite senior in the killing operations. The bourgmestres would organize and plan the killing. They were the ones who received the orders from the state to carry out the genocide, and who were responsible at the local levels for the extermination.

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“It has been some years,” he said. “And we were mad then. It is sometimes difficult to remember one’s moments of madness.” “What did you think of it?” “It was bad, wrong. The state let us down by ordering it.” “Why didn’t you refuse?” He scoffed.

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I asked what he, being a teacher, would have taught in the schools to have avoided the genocide. “Human rights,” he said unequivocally. I

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asked why they were building the road. He said it was punishment. And punishment was good, after what they had done. “But it seems the state asked you to kill, and you killed. Now they ask to build a road, and you build a road.” The older man turned to the younger one, who had so far been silent: “Tell him, tell him! Tell him how it is.” But the former shopkeeper was silent. The bourgmestre continued, “That’s how it is! They tell us to make the road, we do it. They tell us to kill, we would do it. They ordered us to kill at seven a.m. We started as early as nine a.m. All we need is the order. And look there”—he pointed to the adjacent hill, at the top of which we could see a crowd, a platform, and many flags—“he tells us to come to sing for him, and we will go.”

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“Young man,” he said, “maybe you didn’t understand what I meant by human rights. What I mean is that in this kind of country we don’t know where the state ends and where we begin.” He made his hand come over his head, to show the looming state. “And if I don’t know where I begin, I am worth nothing, I don’t have any rights. Then how to feel that another person has rights? How to respect that person. In this country we don’t even know if we exist as people. We are not individuals, we are agents of the state.”

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“It was a different time, the genocide,” he said. “I will never forget that madness.”

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“The big politicians escaped,” he said. “They told us to kill, but are now in five-star foreign prisons, with good food and televisions. We little people must bear the consequences for their decisions.”

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Gibson had said on his last night that one had to seek out what the state did not show—and perhaps did not know it was showing—and that there it was possible to find truth.

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The Intore passed our section. But a middle-aged man started to dance, wildly, singing in praise of the president. He started to go from group to group, goading the girls and touching the boys to join him. He smiled pitifully. “Kagame the hero, the king who has descended from heaven. We love Kagame, vote for Kagame!” he screamed. “Aho! Aho!” But unlike with the Intore the youths distanced themselves from him.

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“I feel sad to see these young people,” Moses said. “They are all drunk. They have been fed Primus, like during the genocide.” Primus was the local beer that the killing mobs had been plied with, and so it held some symbolism.

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So the government gave them Primus and told them to kill. That’s why these campaigns hurt, it hurts to see these young people receiving beer from the government.”

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“Was it wrong to?” “You can’t look and write,” he said. “It is not allowed. If you want to know something you ask him”—he pointed at Moses. “We know him, and we can find him if he tells you some lies. But you are not allowed to look and write by yourself.” I

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what the problem had been with my taking notes. “We have an oral culture,” he said. “People get nervous when you write. Writing also leaves proof. If you don’t write notes the world can be made different. People’s memories can always be questioned, molded.”

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One could not look and write. The narrative was so controlled—even what one saw with one’s eyes. It was again the two worlds Gibson had shown me. One had to see the lights as progress; one wasn’t allowed to ask why the people did not use those roads. One had to see the world as the dictatorship described it. To look and think for yourself was to dissent. It was a remarkable insight into the method of the government that this policeman had revealed.

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There was a ruthlessness to the president’s campaigns; it required a betrayal of oneself.

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This was a man whose forces had overseen so many killings, arrests, disappearances, so many cases of torture. Normally invisible, his power was brought alive.

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He said, “I constantly have to block out the fear. Listen, I think my future has already been decided. It is in some official’s mind, or in a folder on a table in the president’s office. That is our reality in such a country—our lives are determined by other men, not by God. That is the power of this government.”

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Roger twitched nervously. As we walked in the ministry’s garden he pointed below us and said that tanks had recently been given to Rwanda by the American government—Abrams tanks, high-performance machines that made the president feel secure.

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I asked if he would criticize the president on any policies. He started to tell me about the virtues of his party’s program. I interrupted him. “But will you criticize the president?” He said, with some hesitation, “We don’t see the necessity in criticizing the president.” “But he is your opponent.” “Yes, yes.” “I read your recent interview, in which you insist that you will win. Don’t you want people to believe that the president has made any mistakes? Why should they vote for you?” He raised his eyebrows. “It is difficult to criticize the president.”

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I told him that his election platform involved several advanced ideas: adjustments for market regulators, reform in government procurement, family planning, deficit reduction, and the privatization of education. It almost seemed like an American party’s program. He seemed proud. “What about freedom?” He seemed surprised. “Your plan would be great in a country with freedom. In fact, reading your plan you would think that technocratic issues are the country’s only problems, and that the people are free.” He said nothing. “Why do you do it?” I asked, more quietly. “What?” he said, suddenly attentive. I mentioned some of the recent repression. “Why do you participate in this sort of government?” He was quiet. But I felt he was engaging me despite his silence—perhaps he wanted to talk, for at that moment he could have asked me to leave. “Are you content living in this society?” I asked. “Yes of course, my children are here.” “But many others have had to flee,” I said, wistfully. “People with more beautiful offices, bigger houses and cars, who were once very close to the president, have had to flee their country. Why?”

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“There isn’t a plan for how to rebuild a country after genocide,” he said, repeating the president’s discourse. “In such circumstances it is normal that politicians have diverging opinions. This is not new in politics.” “But is it normal that they flee?” He looked me in the eye. “I am following it closely,” he said. “I am also worried. Do you think they were chased?” “Why does divergence of opinion lead to insecurity for these people?” “I don’t know,” he said. “It is a question I have asked myself.” He seemed sincere. “Do people here have the courage to diverge with the power?” I asked. He paused for a long time. Then suddenly he said, “Yes. The proof is us.”

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The president became even more pervasive. His image was on key chains, rearview mirrors and hats. Wartime mottos from his rebellion days were broadcast on the radio, eliciting familiar emotions. School-age children ran down streets and sang traditional songs that replaced “Jesus” with “Kagame.” Everywhere one felt watched by these devoted, and that one’s entire being—actions, thoughts and soul—were scrutinized. I felt profoundly unsafe for not being among the believers.

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The election was a masterpiece of authority. The vote passed in an ambience of total serenity. No negative incidents were reported in the country: there were no protests, no complaints, no boycotts or demonstrations. The people queued up obediently. None of the opposing candidates claimed procedural irregularities. They were playing the theater to perfection, and vowed they would accept the election’s results.

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The official observers were unanimous in their praise. The African Union and the Commonwealth lauded the government’s impeccable planning: how the booths had opened on time, how people had voluntarily lined up with their identity cards in the early morning, and how by 10:00 a.m. practically every citizen—the government claimed a 95 percent participation rate—had cast their ballot. By noon already the booths were empty.

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“The world has important lessons to learn from Rwanda,” gushed a European Union official. Embassy observers hailed it as the most orderly vote they had witnessed in their careers.

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The young Spanish woman, caressing her long hair, introduced herself to me as a propagandist. Her job was to write up positive stories, in supplements to British newspapers, about governments seeking to improve their image on the world stage or seeking to attract foreign investment. But she had found no business in Rwanda, because the foreign press was already so positive. “Journalists come to our country all the time,” a senior minister had told her. “And are stunned by how well we run

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Even the professional propagandist, who had worked in a dozen dictatorships before, was astonished.

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She nodded. “Yes, very obedient.” She was still smiling. “The president is strong today.” “Very strong.” “What if someone disobeys him?” “He will ask for forgiveness.” A few of the ballots were improperly marked, and as though I was some guarantor of fairness the officials held a ballot up to me and asked: “Paul?” I nodded, and did not resist. I felt it was futile to resist against such force.

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But later I would hear that in the provinces some had dared to dissent, that in parts of the country—known for having resisted orders to kill during the genocide—only 10 percent of the people had voted for the president. The mayors in those areas had panicked, worried they would lose their positions, and ensured that the ballots were altered. Now the question was whether they could make sure no one would pass on the truth to the president. The source of this information was someone in the election commission.

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The results were exactly as Moses had predicted a month before. He had told me that it had been decided: the president would receive 93 percent, the next candidate 5 percent, and the remainder split between the others.

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The oppression was obvious to those with experience. A Russian U.N. worker I met three days after he arrived, when I asked what he thought of the country, said at once that it reminded him of the Soviet Union. He had noticed the tone of the newspapers. Another woman I met had grown up in Yugoslavia, under the dictator Tito, and just moved here. She had not known about the nature of the government—the international press was so positive. But after meeting some government officials she came home, sat down her British husband, and said to him: “You have to be very careful what you say in this country.” Her husband had been oblivious. She told me it had been the way people spoke, their mannerisms, something about it all; she could sense the repression.

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By the end of the election the old guard of news journalists had been done away with: killed, imprisoned, exiled or, by fear, converted into Intore. There was a surge of youngsters who took their positions; we also started to get them in our class.

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But Moses returned. He was shaken. It wasn’t what we had imagined—he had not been threatened or beaten. An aide to the president had asked him to fill out a lengthy form with his family history. They were going to recruit Moses as a spy.

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He was to be deployed against his family, some of whom had fled the country and were intellectuals in the Rwandan communities in Europe and America. His task would be to befriend these aunts, uncles, cousins and nephews, and report on them to the government services.

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“I’m not sure,” he told me in a moment of respite. “If you take these jobs you are damned. They use you and then dispose of you. But if you don’t take the job you are damned. They see you as disloyal to the president.”

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The story also revealed something more important but subtle. The genocide had been triggered in 1994 by the assassination of the previous president, whose plane had been shot down. Kagame had always denied attacking his enemy’s plane—he was responsible for ending the genocide, not for sparking it. Yet when the woman in the photograph had recently been arrested in Europe for being involved in the shooting (she was released after intense diplomatic pressure), she had not expressed frustration with the Europeans for wrongly accusing her. She had started to behave as if the president owed her a favor. “Did I shoot the plane to be jailed?” she had asked the president months before the photo incident—and the president had narrated this at the private meeting. But he had not fired her then.

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The man said the whole village had destroyed their own roofs within hours of the government order.

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The woman turned upon hearing us, and stared at us for some time. I expected an appeal of some sort for charity. But instead she started to say, in a hoarse voice, that the president was a visionary for destroying these roofs, and that this was a sign of progress coming to Rwanda. She said the president was a kind man for thinking of the poor. It must have required a humiliation of some sort to say those words.

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“How different is our country today?” said an elderly journalist, staring at the officials. “Do people have the courage to disobey orders?”

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I mentioned the word kufaniya to Roger—the word for the president’s policy of killing his own troops during his rebellion. It was a secret closely guarded, partly because it exposed his cruelty, and because it related to the president’s use of child soldiers—which several warlords had been prosecuted for but he never had.

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I told him what I had learned. But I said that it seemed incredible that the president would order a cull of his own fighters—young boys who had traveled long distances to fight with his rebellion. Could he be that ruthless, and pitilessly calculating? Roger seemed to become cold to me. “I can’t talk about it,” he said. I told him the garden was safe. “I have to think about what you said.” His face was motionless, his eyes unblinking and his breaths sharp. He

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It was alleged that her words were “meant to stir up hatred and fury against the government.” Agnès was found guilty by the court of disrupting state freedom—an ironically worded charge—propagating ethnic division, genocide revisionism and insulting the president.

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Indeed, why kill people, when they can work for you and make you stronger.

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“The hare took the cow’s two horns and planted them in the mud. And then he screamed for the hyena. ‘Master! The cow has drowned! Do something!’ The hyena came, saw the horns, and pulled at them, pulling them out of the mud. ‘Oh no!’ said the hare. ‘You have killed the cow!’ The

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hyena felt ashamed. He thanked the hare for having alerted him, and kept him as his loyal guard.” There was silence. “Don’t trust anyone,” said the grandmother. I know, I said. But it was difficult to live in constant paranoia. Her voice became high-pitched. “They can hurt you.” She scared me. The old woman, and her ghostlike form in the dark, made a disturbing vision. She put her hand on Gibson’s head, her fingers covering his scalp.

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“Roger was sent by the government to Israel, to be trained by Mossad for a year.”

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started to feel sick. What I thought was true was no longer true; what I trusted was betraying; what I believed seemed to menace. I was losing confidence in what I was seeing; the blurred stadium before me seemed to be somehow intangible. “He specializes in counterintelligence, infiltrating enemy camps,” Moses said. “It is the most demanding section—he has been trained to kill his own people, even his friends, to prove his loyalty to the enemy. He is not just anyone. He is used for particular tasks.” I

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“Look around you. These are just poor villagers who have been bused here for the president. They know nothing about the genocide. Look at how the Intore are trying to excite them.” There were people in shirts bearing the president’s face starting to sing songs about the genocide to work up the mood. “This is also his way of exercising power.”

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The embassies had decided that helping the population to speak would hamper their relations with the president. “If we mention the repression to the government it will throw us out,” an official said. “And then we won’t be able to help anyone in the country.”

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It was not the first time that the world had supported repression in Rwanda. The previous regime, whose rule had culminated in genocide, had received similar praise, money and assistance from Western countries, which turned a blind eye to its crimes. Foreign nations, by deciding to finance the government, had become its accomplices. They were making this government powerful, omnipotent, were unequivocally aiding the repression.

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Perversely, the donors also promoted Rwanda as a success. Donors needed to show results for the money they spent. The propaganda, unchallenged, became convenient proof that their aid was doing good. The donors thus became reluctant to talk about repression, and eager to talk about the progress the government was making.

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It created something like a mirage of a country—with more roads, hospitals and institutions where people should learn to think. As the journalists were destroyed more newspapers opened. The roads were kept cleaner. More people said they supported the president. People’s minds were in tatters, increasingly controlled; such a state was being financed.

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The situation in the country was worsening daily. There was little I felt that was in the realm of possibility; the power had infiltrated our effort and left it broken; the government’s assault was gaining pace.

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We had lost this intelligent man. The government had not needed to kill him; they had just made him useless, ruined his mind, with the paranoia, by turning on him those he loved and trusted most, so that he had become a victim of that double world he had showed me, in the lights. He had been fooled by his senses, by what he saw and felt—and it had destroyed him.

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